Josh Rice is a theatre-maker, puppeteer, and teaching artist. He is a rural-arts advocate for his hometown of Perry, NY in rural Western New York, and co-founder and Producing Artistic Director of Shake on the Lake and the New York State Puppet Festival.
JOSH RICE is a multidisciplinary theatre artist specializing in puppetry. Puppetry Credits: Dan Hurlin's Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed (Bard SummerScape, Holland Festival); Shank's Mare (Chicago Int'l Puppet Festival, La MaMa, Japan tour, Hawaii tour, U.S. tour); Petrushka with the NY Philharmonic Orchestra (The Barbican) and the Portland Symphony Orchestra (OR); The Scarlet Ibis (HERE); and his own work, The Marooned at Dixon Place and New York State Puppet Festival 2018; The VaudeVillains and Composite Portrait at La MaMa; The Tempest, directed at Shake on the Lake and Sarah Lawrence College. He also adapted, designed and directed Shake on the Lake’s puppet-infused A Christmas Carol. In 2017, Josh was awarded a Wyoming Country Rural Arts Initiative Grant to start a theatre in an abandoned main street storefront in Perry, NY—Theatre@37—where he also founded and produces the New York State Puppet Festival. He is the co-founder (2012) and Producing Artistic Director of Shake on the Lake, a not-for-profit, summer, touring theatre festival in Silver Lake, NY, that specializes in fast, physical, and accessible adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, incorporating simple performer-driven spectacle, puppetry, live music, improvisation, and audience interaction. SOTL believes in community place-making through the arts, and specializes in serving rural, underserved areas in Western New York State, and beyond. Josh also founded and directs The Mnemonic Theatre Project, a puppetry program for seniors living with Alzheimer’s and Dementia, which has been featured on the PBS documentary series, Visionaries.